I mentioned in my last post that my first attempt to make a quilt for
Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Transformation Challenge was a disaster.
Leah makes beautiful quilts taking a single piece of fabric (or using a few large applique pieces), quilting this with a design and then painting on the quilted quilt. This seemed like a very interesting technique - so why not try it for her challenge?
Inspired by her goddess quilts and all her personal posts, I made "Keep Moving Forward". Light and dark parts of the Möbius strips representing the good and bad times in life. Life swirls around us...we have to keep moving forward...
After looking at this ugly quilt for a while - I still like the idea but the drawing is lacking a central focus to draw you in to the picture. I like my quilting stitches. Painting after quilting the quilt, is the real disaster.
I am not a painter. I also like to improvise when quilting. So, I launched into painting with limited painting supplies and no plan. The colors turned out
very ugly. Then, I tried to paint over them and the paint got too thick on the quilt and the colors just got worse. The attempts at shading just did not work. I soaked and washed the quilt in hot water hoping to get some of the paint out with no luck.
I think for now I need to stick with piecing or applique if I plan to make a quilt for a show or challenge. If I plan to paint a quilt, I better practice painting on paper first!
Interesting though, after I messed up this quilt, one of the ladies in my art quilting group did a class on this technique of drawing, quilting, painting. Here is the little quilt I made in that workshop. It is called Rounding the Mark.
This came out much better! The painting was much simpler - just white for the sails and a few simple colors for the boats and buoy. It isn't a great work of art but I like it and it looks good in my nautical themed powder room.
Maybe there is hope for me using this technique after all.
Happy Quilting
Amber
